Starry Night
by Gaemma
Summary: He can't understand it. It doesn't make any sense. Some detail is puzzling Harry
1. Starry Night

"Hermione, one of your earrings is missing"

She lifted a hand to her earlobe as if to check for herself that the little star-shaped jewel was indeed missing.

"It must have caught in my clothes when I changed back in my dorm room earlier" she replied before putting down her fork.

Rain had been pouring down all day, but that didn't stop Hagrid from making them feed very ugly and slimy looking creatures during today's Care of Magical Creatures lesson. Afterwards, every Gryffindor had rushed back inside the castle to shower and change before dinner.

Dinner had been quick. With laboured breaths, Hermione, Ron and Harry climbed the stairs towards the astronomy tower. They had shared-third-year astronomy class with Slytherin tonight. After much self-motivational inner pep talk, they accepted earlier at dinner the fact that any plan of spending the evening warming up with a cup of hot chocolate in front of the fire in the common room was out of the question. Fate had decided that the weather should clear tonight, thus making it absolutely perfect for resuming their study of the stars.

Each of them set up their lended telescope towards the sky and got out parchment from their bags to map down the sky. Ron cursed as he angled his towards the sky. Apparently, the previous user had forgotten to wipe the telescope's lens and left blurred fingerprints on it. Harry and some other Gryffindors laughed when Hermione declared that Ron took the exact same spot as last Wednesday and that she knew for a fact - because of the disastrous wether conditions all week - that nobody had used the astronomy tower since then.

The air was chilly and Harry wished he thought about bringing his scarf.

Hermione was shivering, her hair being still damp from her shower. She lifted her wand and cast a drying spell. Her frizzy hair flew against the wind.

"Someone please tell Granger to tame that? I can't see the sky anymore with that monstrosity flapping against the wind"

Ron was interrupted from swearing against Parkinson when Professor Sinistra pointed the class to a bright star of obscure name making its apparition as the last remaining cloud finally cleared away.

Everyone but Harry turned their telescope toward the star. Something shiny had caught his gaze while glancing past the professor's shoulder towards where Parkinson and Malfoy were standing.

Something small was sparkling in Malfoy's own scarf, reflecting a moon's ray of light.

Apparently, someone else noticed that as well, as he saw Pansy Parkinson reaching towards the shiny object with furrowed brows. She held it in her right palm and stared at it with a curious look on her face.

Harry didn't see what happened next because Ron tapped his shoulder to ask him to lend him a lens wipe. But when he looked back to the pair again, Parkinson looked as if someone had made her eat a particularly nasty fruit, while Malfoy hastily put something away in his bag.

The lesson dragged for half an hour longer before Professor Sinistra deemed they gathered enough material for the essay they had to turn over before the beginning of Christmas break.

Students started chatting again while putting away their things and covering down their telescope with protective sheets. Two things happened simultaneously, as Harry accidentally dropped the content of his bag while a gush of wind prevented one particular Draco Malfoy from putting down the drop cloth on his own telescope. The blond wizard cursed as he sprinted to catch the sheet before it flew beyond the railing.

Nobody seemed to stop on the fact that the wind had set down some time earlier own, as Harry discreetly put away his wand back into his cloak and told his friends to go ahead of him while he picked up his things.

After Ron and Hermione had gone, he creeped towards Malfoy's previous spot and quickly stole the shiny object buried in the blond's bag to put it in his own.

Harry exited the rooftop and descended the tower staircase with haste. As soon as he could hide, he slipped in a nook behind a statue representing a wizard levitating a tiny solar system. He dived in his bag for a cold metal object.

A small star-shaped earring stared at him from his open palm.

* * *

A sneaky fic.

Can't afford long chapters for the moment, so next part is being posted right now to make up for the shortness

Thank you for reading my first post (posted on Tumblr originally)!


	2. Purple goo

"Where did you find this?" Hermione asked him.

Harry had been toying with the star shaped-earring between his fingers since he came back to the common room that night. Events from earlier where still replaying in his mind. But he couldn't find any sense in it all.

"I picked it up in the astronomy tower. » He decided for a neutral enough answer.

She didn't seem affected by his answer, it had to mean she genuinely didn't suspect anything.

He couldn't suspect her.

Nothing made sense.

The strange happenings of that day were then packed somewhere far in his brain, surely through some unconscious will.

…

"I can't meet Hagrid tonight I'm sorry. I have to go to the library."

"You're always in the library Hermione, surely it won't refuse you access if you don't go there for an hour time? » asked Ron. « Besides, it's been a week since Hagrid's been asking us to visit him."

"Can't do tonight, I'm sorry." She said with a tone of finality and walked away.

"She's strange these days Hermione, don't you think?"

"I guess she has her reasons, Ron." Harry replied with a fake tone of detachment.

The Marauder map showed Hermione to be exactly where she said she'd be. Her name appeared in the library, and most importantly, it was alone.

Harry drank the strong tea offered by Hagrid with more ease.

…

They were asked to brew a Regenerative potion today. Of course, half of the ingredients had to be comprised of insects that crawled with unmatched speed as soon as Harry or Ron made a move to grab them. In the table next to his and Ron's, Malfoy was having no such difficulty with his own insects. Harry hated to acknowledge the fact that the bastard was gifted when it came to potions. The only person who managed better results was Hermione. An immense sense of pride overcame him at the thought of Malfoy Senior giving his son an earful for being thus beaten in class by a muggle born.

The scene forming in his mind made the mysterious earring incident come back to the forefront of his mind. As such, he didn't notice Ron adding an extra beetle leg into their shared cauldron until it was too late. The content that now was an ugly shade of purple bubbled and boiled over the cauldron to the table and down on the floor. It emitted a foul smell that made Ron, who was right above it, faint on the spot, as well as Neville, who was unfortunate enough to have been asking Ron for an ant. His own seemed to have fled him like the plague.

A gloomy voice snarled next to Harry.

"What have we got here, Potter. Not only you decide to waste valuable ingredients, but also choose to render unconscious other students in my class? I am afraid this will cost twenty points from Gryffindor."

« But… »

"And you will stay behind to clean up the mess. » Snape added, his tone final.

Harry cursed the man under his breath. Fortunately, Ron and Neville were slowly getting conscious again. But the purple hue of their hair was in itself less than fortunate.

He stayed behind in the classroom. Snape had left him to his own device, and Hermione had to bring Ron and Neville to the hospital wing.

He scrubbed the purple moss that seemed to adhere to the dungeon's floor despite the numerous _scourgify_ spells he tried. If only Hermione was here, she surely knew how to remove that goo that has spread all across the floor.

Crawling under the table next to the one he previously occupied, Harry noticed a parchment on the floor that went untouched by the purple nightmare. It was severely balled-up but he managed to flatten it enough to make out the moving drawing that was sketched onto the parchment.

An inked-drawn girl with a mass of curls and faint traces of freckles on her nose was intently stirring the content of the cauldron in front of her. Harry gasped as his miniature best friend looked in his direction and blinked.

He recognized the style in this drawing. Its sibling was crunched in his bag since their last Defense Against the Dark Arts class, when professor Lupin had failed to show up and Snape had taken over. Harry had played against Hufflepuff on the Quidditch pitch that same evening. And true to the drawing's prediction, Harry had indeed been thrown off his dear nimbus that day. Just as Malfoy had hinted in ink.

It couldn't make any sense.

* * *

Thank you for reading!


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